The word “slop” is pretty widespread now. It was even Merriam-Webster’s 2025 word of the year!

I don’t think I really need to define it carefully; you know what I mean. Instead, I’m more interested in how people use the word and the existential worries that usually come with it.

When we talk about slop, we’re obviously talking about AI. And fair enough. So much of what most people produce with AI day to day definitely is slop. By default, its writing is bland, chipper, vaguely corporate pablum, and the images all have The Look. You know what I mean: even when it’s trying to be photorealistic and doesn’t have any obvious “mistakes”, you can spot it pretty quickly. Here, I pulled a few random ones from the subreddit r/isthisAI and youtube:

Unless we zoom way in, none of these have a clear “mistake” (like extra fingers, misspelled words, etc), yet they all have… The Look. If I had to put it in words: for the first, I’d say it’s the font and lighting; for the second I’d say it’s the weird over-neatness of a warehouse and also the lighting; and for the third it’s… kind of the texture and lighting? It does some real horror show stuff with food. They often have the “piss filter” tone.

Anyway, my point isn’t to dunk on slop. That’s fun but too easy. My point is to say that we’ve always had slop! And that we shouldn’t worry too much about it in the future.

It hit me when I was at the gym. For whatever reason, they have chive TV on the TVs at all times. Google’s search AI summary describes it as:

Chive TV is a video service that offers a continuous stream of entertaining content, including viral videos, funny clips, and scenic visuals. It is primarily designed for public venues such as bars and restaurants, enhancing the atmosphere with engaging, audio-optional programming.

…that’s about as nicely as you can say “slop” without using the word itself. It’s just this constant stream of craaazy~ animal videos, dudeperfect-esque feats, dogs doing funny things, neat little craft projects, and people getting minorly injured (“football in the groin” type stuff). I’ll admit that sometimes it’s hard not to look at it, but it really is just slop.

There’s the same thing with music. Most AI music has a “slop” sound texture even when it’s occasionally funny or good. But, and I know this is a cliche, a lot of non-AI music really does too. There’s the famous 4 Chords song but to be honest I don’t think that’s actually an example of this. The songs they reference do all use that same chord progression, but they’re across a huge range of genres, with pretty different sounds to them despite that. Another reason might be that the chords are generally more of a “frame” of a song, and not the most immediate thing most people will consciously pick up on.

On the other hand, the melody is one of the parts people notice easily. Put another way, I don’t know of any examples of musicians suing one another over chord progressions, but I can think of several examples off the top of my head of lawsuits about a melody being copied. I think a better example of human music slop is this video I saw on the “Gen Alpha Melody” (note: ironically, a bunch of the songs got copyright struck). The pop songs featured in that video feel especially slop-y, since aside from the melody, the production techniques and singing styles are often fairly standardized.

Again, my point is just that we’ve always had it, even before AI. I think most people will agree with that to some extent, but say that the fact that it’s so easy now means there will be much more and we’ll be flooded with it. I haven’t been on it myself in ages, but I hear people say that this is what facebook has become.

That seems pretty bad at first sight. But, I think the answer is gonna eventually come down to: is it giving people what they want or not? If it is, it’s not really a problem, or at least, it’s a much trickier problem about higher order desires and stuff. If it’s not, then the easy solution is just some form of curation or gatekeeping. Here are a few examples:

If facebook becomes (is?) a feed of 100% slop, either people actually don’t mind that (??) and keep using it, or people stop using it. If enough people stop using it because of this, facebook would change their practices to require some form of (human) verification, or aggressively try to combat the slop. Alternately, another company would fill the need if facebook didn’t change (I suppose this leaves the edge cases of people who want to remain anonymous, but I think there could be technical solutions to that as well).

Similarly, for slop like the gym TV example above, or low budget restaurant posters/menus, or kind of generic music… does it even matter?

I want to say more about this in a future post, but it’s relevant so I’ll say it briefly here: we think of music, art, writing, etc, as these divine sparks of creativity that are uniquely human. And they definitely can be! But, it’s also the case that the vast majority of those things are very practical and utilitarian, and people don’t really want them to be much more. They either fulfill the purpose or they don’t, and then the same idea as above will apply here.

One aspect that will definitely affect the utility is the quality of the generated thing, but I actually don’t think it’s very important or interesting here. For example, assume a sandwich shop is using AI images for a sandwich board on the sidewalk. If the patrons just don’t care, it’s not really a problem. If it has that nauseating look like in the link above, it’ll turn people off of the food and the shop will learn to make it better or not use it. If it’s not gross, but is still just obviously slop and it bothers people because of that, they might choose not to patronize the place (as some people are already loudly doing) and again, it’ll fall to the shop to either change it or not.

(as an aside, I’ll say two things: first, even pre-AI, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen almost zero correlation between how a restaurant presents their food in media and how good it is; I’ve seen some run-down places with truly awful food pics end up having great food, and I’ve seen some places that are really polished and media savvy have the blandest and most uninteresting food. Second, I saw a funny clip a while ago of someone saying that, despite the fact that he thought AI graphics are cringe, it’s actually a good signal of an ethnic restaurant being legit, because the only people who actually care about not using those images for moral or cultural reasons aren’t the ones you want making that food; you want a chef who has absolutely no clue about all this nonsense!)

So, I don’t think the quality aspect matters much. Low quality will naturally get pruned. The more interesting part is when the quality is very high, and indistinguishable from the human made equivalent. Some disagree, but in terms of judging solely the product in a vacuum, I think it’s basically an inevitability that this will happen. At that point, I’m not sure we should even call it slop, but I think many people would still say it is, because of how it was made.

This is trickier, but I think the same dynamic would unfold. If there’s value (for some people) in a human doing the thing, it won’t matter that a machine can do it. Some people are still interested in strongman competitions despite them lifting a fraction of a machine; chess is more popular than ever despite people being surpassed by AI long ago. People still pay to go to concerts where the musician actually plays live and it’s uncommon for people to go to a concert where the music is just being played from a recording. On social media, if people truly value a human connection, there are plenty of technical ways to ensure the person behind the screen is human.

I think the reasoning behind many of these worries implicitly assumes that people are passive and don’t respond to incentives and desires. Strangely, many of the people I’ve heard use this reasoning are definitely not passive themselves, they just seem to view the majority of other people as docile herd animals 🙃